Thursday, May 5, 2016

A couple of weeks after Arthur
died I wrote in my journal, “I don’t remember one of the stages of grief being hell. That’s where I am right now.” A
few weeks later I wrote, “I’m in the wanting-to-break-something stage of grief
now.”

Two months in I wrote,My stages of grief so far:

Shock. Total numbness.

NO! This made me feel like a 2-year-old, shouting ‘NO!’ at the top
of my lungs while crying. Lasting at least six weeks, this stage isn’t through
yet. This is also the time of magical thinking, like a young child.

Goddamn It. Started about week 7. Not anger at Arthur, just general
displeasure at how life looks.

After four months I wrote, “What
stage am I in now? What comes up is dullness.
A dull plodding through the days, because the weight of the reality has sunk
in. Arthur is not coming back, I’m going to have to face living the rest of my
life without him. It’s an acceptance of sorts, but a very unhappy one. There’s
been a return of the bone-weary tiredness.”

For years I had heard about the ‘five
stages of grief’: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
But when I actually got to the point of experiencing
grief these didn’t fit my experience at all. When someone has already died how
does bargaining enter the picture?

With a little research I
learned that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross delineated these famous stages for people who were dying, not for those who were grieving.

I’ve read a number of books
about grief and hadn’t found any that describe the stages of grief in a way
that matched my experience until I found Giving
Sorrow Words, by Candy Lightner and Nancy Hathaway. Ms. Lightner founded
MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, after her 13-year-old daughter was killed
by a drunk driver. Ms. Lightner learned that psychologists have identified
various patterns of grieving, and one of these, by psychoanalyst Dr. John
Bowlby (1907-1990), resonated with me.

Dr. Bowlby broke grief down
into four stages: shock and numbness, yearning and searching, disorganization
and despair, and reorganization.

Saturday, April 9, 2016

Do you know the feeling of
having seen a word countless times but still not knowing what it means or even
how to pronounce it? Recently I had this experience with the word ‘synecdoche.’
A friend was describing a film and asked if I was familiar with…and here he
said something that sounded to me like schenectady.
I asked, “You mean Schenectady, New York?”

“No,” he said. “Synecdoche.” (sin-eck-duh-key)
“It means when you talk in shorthand, like saying ‘North Carolina lost the
final NCAA game this year.’ A synecdoche is a part referring to the whole; the
listener knows you’re not talking about the state of North Carolina but the
university basketball team.”

Later I looked synecdoche up online. Other
examples are: “The White House announced a new plan today,” and “I’ll give you
a hand.” Obviously the White House can’t make announcements, and when we offer
our hand in help we mean our whole body will be there too.

As I thought about the word I
realized this is a painful aspect of the death of a spouse: the loss of your
partner in compressed speech. Arthur and I could half-say things because we
knew the other could fill in the spaces. He could say a couple of words and I
would know the reference, which would set us both to laughing, or nodding our
heads in thoughtful agreement. We had a secret language. I miss it.

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

I have written before about the
pain of ceasing to say “we” and “our,” and instead saying “I” and “my” in the
year since my husband Arthur’s death. I loved being “we” with Arthur. I often
signed things A&K.

The first year of my grief was
a sorrowful, halting acceptance of the loss of this “we-ness,” and a slow, scary
embrace of being alone. [See this earlier
post.]

As I have moved into my second
year of grieving I feel ready to move on with life, to explore the ways my life
will unfold without Arthur as a living partner.

Contemplating what “my” life
would look like, what was “authentically me,” it occurred to me that that was
an absurd concept. How can there be a “me” disconnected from all that is around
me? Isn’t the truth of who I am a profound interconnection with the All?

Starting from the closest point
of intimacy, what I realized is that my life from this point on will still be
an “our” life with Arthur. The person I am and everything I do will be
influenced for the rest of my life by my thirty-four years in relationship with
Arthur. I am deeply shaped by sharing Arthur’s vision of the universe as a Game of God. I am deeply shaped by sharing
Arthur’s highest principle: the love of truth. I am deeply shaped by our love.

My life is an “our” life with
my family. Who I am and everything I do will be influenced for the rest of my
life by my fifty-eight years in relationship with the Tom and Jean Brugger
family and all of that family’s branches backwards and forwards in time. I am
deeply shaped not only by my parents and siblings, but by my grandparents, and
great-grandparents, and uncles. I am now being shaped by my nieces, which I
cherish (I don’t have any nephews, unfortunately).

My life is an “our” life with
the people of the United States. Who I am and everything I do will be
influenced for the rest of my life by my fifty-eight years in relationship with
the culture and worldview of the U.S. in the second half of the twentieth
century and the first part of the twenty-first. I am deeply shaped by the
legacy of the authors of the U.S. Constitution and their vision of equality and
liberty for all human beings (as imperfectly as it may have been realized in
their time, it was still a shining vision); I am deeply shaped by the struggles
of the 1960s to bring that vision forward into our time, the civil rights and
feminist movements; I am deeply shaped by the prosperity and opportunity of the
social class I was born into…

My life is an “our” life with
the planet Earth. Who I am and everything I do will be influenced for the rest
of my life by my fifty-eight years in relationship with this beautiful planet,
the sights and sounds unique to this place and time in the universe. I am
deeply shaped by living on a planet with one Sun and one Moon. How different would
it be to live on a planet with no sunset because there was more than one Sun,
or a planet with multiple moons? I am deeply shaped by living on a planet with
trees and whales and mosquitoes and blue-green algae. I am deeply shaped by the
evolutionary lineage that resulted in the intelligent bipeds we call Homo sapiens. I am deeply shaped by the other
peoples and cultures that share this precious planet.

My life is an “our” life with
the universe. Who I am and everything I do will be influenced for the rest of
my life by my fifty-eight years in relationship with the cosmos. Who would I be
without the Big Bang?

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

“Be present” is a common admonition these days. Eckhart
Tolle became famous for his book The
Power of Now, which is about being present in the here and now. The idea is
to let go of our obsession with the past and future, neither of which actually
exist in this moment.

I just read a twist on this concept that I really like. In
the book The Spell of the
Sensuous, author David Abram writes about the difference between
‘present’ and ‘presence.’

In my mind, ‘being present’ meant that you somehow managed
to step outside the flow of time. But as I read Mr. Abram’s discussion I
realized that when you are ‘in the present’ you are, in fact, still in time.
You are in this moment of ‘now,’ and
then that now, and then that now.

Presence, on the other hand, is about just being. When you are in presence you are not aware of time at
all. You are so involved in what you are doing that time becomes meaningless.
Most of us have experienced this many times—those blissful moments of play when
you lose yourself like a child to the game, or in lovemaking that envelops you
in the sensuousness of your body, or while creating art—when you come out of
that experience of presence hours may have passed and it feels like minutes.

This is what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the experience of
‘Flow.’ (This
is a link to his TED talk on Flow.)

As I thought about this, it seemed to me that ‘present’ has
the feeling of a static state, while ‘presence’ is dynamic, is experience, is being.

Mr. Abram took this concept of presence from Martin
Heidegger and his book Time and Being.
This is a quote from Heidegger:

Obviously, time is not
nothing. Accordingly, we maintain caution and say: there is time. We become
still more cautious, and look carefully at that which shows itself as time, by
looking ahead to Being in the sense of presence, the present. However, the
present in the sense of presence differs so vastly from the present in the
sense of the now…[T]he present as presence and everything which belongs to such
a present would have to be called real time, even though there is nothing
immediately about it of time as time is usually represented in the sense of a
succession of a calculable sequence of nows.

Friday, March 18, 2016

Recently someone said they
thought it was odd that people will say, when someone they love has died, that
they’ve ‘lost’ that person. I used to think it was odd too…until my husband
died. Now I find myself saying, “I lost my husband.”

This came to mind tonight
because I wrote in my journal: Oh my love
my heart aches for you. The anguish at your loss is still overwhelming.

Of course—this is why we say we
‘lost’ someone when they died. Not because we’re saying death is like losing
your car keys and we think the person will be found (although there is that
wild irrational hope). It’s that death is loss. Profound loss. When someone we
love dies, that means we have lost a part of our life, a part of our self, the
part that was that person. I have lost Arthur. I am suffering the loss of his
physical being in my life.

Sunday, March 6, 2016

In my book We Are All Innocent by Reason
of Insanity I describe how we tell a Story that defines our lives. What
I mean by insanity is ‘confusing our mind-generated reality with actual
reality.’ Our personal narratives are an example of that confusion. We begin to
tell stories about ourselves as small children. Our families and teachers tell
us stories about ourselves. We spin these stories into a personal narrative. By
the time we reach adulthood we have forgotten that this narrative is just a story
and believe it is the truth of who we are.

One of the suggestions I make in We Are All Innocent is to ‘question the Story.’

Last fall I was camping with a friend and in the evening we
had a long, lovely conversation by lamplight. She told me of a book she had
read that started with a description of a man’s life. He was an engineer and
totally uninterested in matters of the heart. He had no close friends, no wife
or children. Then one day at 40 an illness struck and he found himself in the
hospital, close to death. He spent days in his hospital bed “rewriting the
story of his life.”

I stopped my friend there—“What an incredible image,” I
said. “Rewriting the story of your life. What a powerful concept.”

My friend went on with the story: the man survived and
completely changed his priorities. I don’t remember much else about it, because
I was filled with wonder at the possibilities inherent in ‘rewriting the
story.’

This thought has stayed with me, and I have looked at how I
have rewritten my personal narrative over the course of my life.

I grew up in a family I compare to the “Leave it to Beaver”
TV show: dad worked, mom took care of the kids, no problems. Part of my childhood
Story was “I am part of a completely normal American family.” Then one day in
1974 this storyline was shattered when my father announced he was leaving. At
that time, in the upper-middle class town we lived in, divorce was still rare. My
narrative told me that being the child of divorced parents meant I was
defective in some way.

This became part of my Story. I was flawed. I was defective.
I was not good enough. My best friends for the rest of my time in high school
were also children of divorce. My husband was a child of divorce. I became
insecure about my abilities and talents and didn’t pursue the professional
career I had always expected was my future.

Sunday, February 28, 2016

Recently I read The TibetanBook of the Dead, translated by Robert Thurman. More accurately, I read his
introduction to Tibetan culture and Buddhism, and only a couple of the actual
prayers for the dead. I found the prayers too esoteric to be of any meaning for
me.

But I found the introduction well worth reading. A couple of
ideas jumped out at me. One was the concept of Tibetan Buddhists as
‘psychonauts.’ Thurman asserts that the Tibetan Buddhist tradition is a science
rooted in empirical evidence, and the explorers are like astronauts: where the
astronaut explores outer space, the psychonaut explores inner space.

The other idea was ‘spiritual productivity.’ Thurman writes
that

In contrast to Western ideas, the Tibetan view is that the
mental or spiritual cannot always be reduced to material quanta and manipulated
as such—the spiritual is itself an active energy in nature, subtle but more
powerful than the material. The Tibetan view is that the ‘strong force’ in
nature is spiritual, not material. This is what gives the Tibetan character its
‘inwardness.’ Thus while Western and Tibetan personalities share the complex of
modernity of consciousness, they are diametrically opposed in outlook, one
focused outward on matter and the other inward on mind.

This difference of personality underlies the difference
between the two civilizations. While the American national purpose is ever-greater
material productivity, the Tibetan national purpose is ever-greater spiritual
productivity. Spiritual productivity is measured by how deeply one’s wisdom can
be developed, how broadly one’s compassion can exert itself.

What an amazing concept! Imagine measuring our national
economy and our personal lives not by the growth in GDP or income but in the growth
of our compassion. What if when we meet someone, our defining question is not
‘what do you do?” but ‘what wisdom have you learned? How are you serving
others?’

Note: Robert Thurman
is a Buddhist, and professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia
University. He’s also the father of Uma Thurman.

Thursday, February 4, 2016

Last year someone kindly gave me a book of daily meditations
for grief, called Healing After Loss,
by Martha Hickman. Each day has a quote by someone else and Ms. Hickman’s reflections
on the quote. A few days ago the quote was:

“Even desolation is a country to be explored.” Sylvia
Townsend Warner

There are some platitudes that people in our culture fall back on when
confronted with uncomfortable situations, like being around someone who has
just lost a loved one. A particularly distasteful one, to someone who is
freshly grieving, is the intimation that the experience will make you a better,
stronger person. I have hated the idea that grief could be a growing experience.
It’s a horrible concept to imagine yourself profiting by the death of your
loved one in any way.

But this quote has a different spin for me. This says: I’m here in desolation, what is this
experience? What is here for me to learn?

In an earlier blog post I wrote about my first trip to the grocery store
after Arthur died. I was raw and bleeding and it felt like it must be obvious
to all who saw me. And yet the woman at the register acted like everything was
ordinary. She couldn’t see my pain! I turned and looked around me with wonder:
what sorrow was under the surface of all the people around me that I couldn’t
see?

In her discussion of this quote Ms. Hickman writes of a Buddhist tale in
which a woman whose child has died went to see Buddha to ask him to bring her
child back to life. He told her he could help her if she brought back a handful
of mustard seeds from a house where death had not visited. The woman traveled
far and wide but she could find no one who hadn’t lost someone they loved. This
experience taught her that suffering is a part of life. And she found a way to
heal her suffering through compassion, understanding, and love for all of
humanity.

This week three people I know are exploring their own personal countries
of desolation. The first is a single mom who underwent emergency surgery
yesterday. Her mother died a few years ago so she was lacking that most basic
support. What worries must she have endured in the few days between her trip to
the ER and her surgery?

The second is a man who has worked brutally hard for fifteen years to
build a successful business. Today he had to tell his lenders that he will
default on his loans.

The third is waiting on test results for a fatal illness.

I find myself holding these three in my heart, walking that desolate
country with them, holding them close. And I can do this only because I have
become so familiar with my own personal desolate landscape.

Through the exploration of the country of desolation—the understanding
that everyone lives in this place at least some of the time—I am beginning to
experience a profound fellowship with everyone on Earth, bringing a deep compassion
to life. I ask every day that my exploration will open my heart to the
suffering of others and help me to love without judgment or condition.

Note: The Buddhist story brings to mind Jesus’s admonition that if your
faith was as a mustard seed you could move mountains (Matthew 17:20). What is
it about mustard seeds? I know they are tiny, but is there something else?

Footnote: I'd like to give credit for the quote but Ms. Hickman does not provide any information for where these quotes come from.

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

I have one regret. I don’t have
more of Arthur on video. And I have over a hundredhours of him on video. One of the
things we did in 2010 was produce a weekly hour-long TV show called “A Question
of Meaning.” The show consisted entirely of the two of us talking about subjects
of interest to us. This means I have 52
hours of us talking to each other. What a gift…and I still want more (grief
is insatiable).

It’s like a miracle when I
watch one of the AQOM shows. For an hour it’s like Arthur is right here with
me. In the following segment we answer a viewer’s question about the nature of
our relationship.

But my advice to everyone and
anyone is to take more video. Take more photos. When someone you love dies you will
never have enough.

Don’t just video special
moments. Video ordinary moments. I have video of Arthur and I playing cards
with his parents, for an entire hour (the length of the videotape, this was in
1994). And video of an entire Thanksgiving dinner with them. These are precious
because they capture life. Not people
posed for the camera, or extraordinary moments of excitement, but those moments
that seemed very ordinary at the time but in retrospect have become very precious.

Thursday, January 21, 2016

I love to read, so I’ve been
searching out all the books on grieving I can find. I’ve read mostly memoirs,
personal accounts of the author’s passage through grief. Interestingly, the
books I’ve found so far are about the loss of a spouse or a parent. For some
reason the best-known books in this genre don’t seem to include books by those
who have lost a child. Is that loss too painful to write about?

My favorite book, by far, and
clearly a favorite of many because it is often mentioned, is C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. The book is very short
but quite powerful—raw, immediate, passionate, questioning. There were many passages
when my eyes were too full of tears to see the page. I felt like he expressed
my feelings over and over again.

Lewis is remarkably honest
about the details of his grief and about how his wife’s death caused him to
question both his faith and the nature of God (you can read pertinent passages here).

His questioning of God rang
true for me. I was shocked that the other writers I’ve read didn’t talk about
this. Grief was an existential crisis for me that entailed the questioning of everything. Lewis doesn’t question the
existence of God, but asks whether God is a Cosmic Sadist, or a Vet intent on
Vivisection, tearing our guts apart while we’re still alive for some reason of
His own. I wanted to know what the purpose of life was—what’s the point if
we’re just going to die?

Lewis describes how he
desperately wants to know where his beloved wife is, and hates platitudes like
“she’s at peace” or “she’s with God.” His experience was that once he passed
through the early days of desperation and was less passionately seeking her
presence, he began to experience her presence in a unique way. Not in the ways
he would have thought, but with an unemotional, almost intellectual knowing.

This book gave me the sense
that I wasn’t alone, that others had been here before me.

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Beauty has been one of my
greatest solaces in this year of my grief. I’ve spent a lot of time in the
woods in order to immerse myself in beauty. I’ve also started doing some reading
on the subject, and my first stop was the Irish poet and philosopher John
O’Donoghue’s book Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (listen to an interview with him). His subtitle expresses my experience: beauty is Nature’s
comforting embrace telling me there is Some Thing More to the world than meets
the eye.

What is beauty? Is beauty
something objective, present in certain objects and absent in others? Is beauty
subjective, something “in the eye of the beholder”?

What I have learned this year,
and found confirmed in O’Donoghue’s book, is there is a third possibility:
Beauty is an essential part what is.

The ancient Greeks thought this
way. Plato considered Beauty to be one of the Ideal Forms that constitute the
true reality behind our physical world of space-time. Medieval philosophers
believed there were five ‘Transcendentals’: Being, the One, the Good, the True,
and the Beautiful. These transcendentals are the foundation of the universe.
These five principles underlay everything. This means that no matter where you
look, if you have eyes to see, you will see the transcendentals. A whole book
could be written on what this means, but I want to stay focused on beauty. What
this means to me is that Beauty is at the essence of everything.

O’Donoghue quotes another
writer, Francesca Aran Murphy, on this point:

Part of what it means to be, is
to be beautiful. Beauty is not superadded to things: it is one of the springs
of their reality. It is not that which effects a luscious response in
perceivers; it is the interior geometry of things, making them perceptible as
forms.

I love the phrase ‘the interior
geometry of things.’ This is like the Medieval philosopher’s belief that the
transcendentals form the superstructure of the universe. Is this why ‘sacred
geometry’ is so beautiful? Why mathematicians talk about the beauty of an
equation?

I have written in earlier blog
posts about perceiving ‘bounteous beauty’ in nature; what I meant by that is
this ‘essential beauty.’ It doesn’t mean seeing an object that I subjectively
experience as beautiful, like a flower or sunset, but seeing the profound,
awe-inspiring experience that ALL is
beautiful. It is precisely the all-embracing nature of this beauty that points
me to something beyond the physical.

O’Donoghue agrees with this conception
of beauty as an aspect of being [‘ontological’ means questions concerned with
‘the nature of being’]:

Ontologically, beauty is the
secret sound of the deepest thereness of things. To recognize and celebrate
beauty is to recognize the ultimate sacredness of experience, to glimpse the
subtle embrace of belonging where we are wed to the divine, the beauty of every
moment, of every thing.

In the 18th century European
philosophers began to question the idea of objective beauty; they argued that
beauty is also subjective. As time went on the conception of beauty moved
farther and farther into the realm of subjectivity; today it seems that many people
in our culture believe that there is no such thing as objective beauty.

Of course there is an element
of subjectivity in my response to the beauty (or perceived lack) in a
particular object. For example, you and I might disagree on the beauty of a
painting. I may find the work of Jackson Pollack frivolous and you may find his
paintings works of sublime beauty. That’s the subjective level. What modern
philosophers are saying (I think) is there is no objective standard that can
definitively settle our disagreement.

But the Beauty that O’Donoghue
and I are talking about is at a deeper level. This level is embedded in the
beingness of things in the world. At a level below that of subject and object.

O’Donoghue had this to say
about the concept that beauty was subjective:

We have often heard that beauty
is in the eye of the beholder. This is usually taken to mean that the sense of
beauty is utterly subjective; there is no accounting for taste because each
person’s taste is different. The statement has another, more subtle meaning: if
our style of looking becomes beautiful, then beauty will become visible and
shine forth for us. We will be surprised to discover beauty in unexpected
places where the ungraceful eye would never linger. The graced eye can glimpse
beauty anywhere, for beauty does not reserve itself for special elite moments
or instances; it does not wait for perfection but is present already secretly
in everything. When we beautify our gaze, the grace of hidden beauty becomes
our joy and our sanctuary.

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

I went to a new dentist today.
When we were having our initial consult it came out that my husband had died. The
dentist was instantly sympathetic; it turns out his first wife died at age 39
from a brain tumor. This was twenty years ago but as he talked I could tell he
was still sad about losing her.

We talked about grief a little,
and then he said, “Our culture has a real problem facing death. Have you
noticed how people avoid talking to you?”

“Yeah I notice,” I replied.

“My wife was quite well known
and I couldn’t believe how many people would see me at an event or somewhere
after she had died and wouldn’t say anything about her death, they’d just talk
about the weather or something. Like they were afraid they were going to say
the wrong thing so they said nothing.”

I told him, “What I started
doing was just bringing it up myself because I couldn’t stand it. I’d say, ‘I
know it’s really awkward but believe me, I’m used to having this awkward
conversation now so let’s get it over with.’”

“People didn’t seem to
understand that I wanted to talk about it. And when you don’t it’s like there’s
this elephant in the room,” he said earnestly.

“And if you have some kind of
ongoing relationship with the person, that elephant is just going to keep
growing until it crowds out any possibility of relationship.”

Recently a friend wrote me an
email after reading the post in which I offered some suggestions on how to
treat a grieving person. She thought people were paralyzed by their fear of doing
or saying the wrong thing. And she also thought that each grieving person would
feel differently about this. I know these are both true. But here was this
dentist, twenty years after his wife’s death, talking as if it had happened
last year. It had clearly been traumatic for him that people had not spoken to
him about his wife.

Last week I read a memoir by a
widow called Grieving: A Love Story.
The author, Ruth Coughlin, worked as an editor in a newspaper office. After her
husband died and she went back to work, half of her co-workers offered her
their condolences but the other half avoided her at all costs. A friend had
warned her that would happen. She was as bothered by it as my dentist.

This awkwardness is part of our
culture’s confused relationship with death. Born from our denial and
segregation of death from ordinary life, we try to hold ourselves apart from death
whenever it comes close. It’s like there’s this voice whispering in our ear: “If
I don’t speak to that woman whose husband died, I won’t risk getting
contaminated by death.” That sounds irrational but there’s some dynamic like
that at work in our minds.

There is a couple that Arthur
and I knew casually. Over the few years we’ve known them I have become better
friends with the woman. After Arthur died, I have seen this couple a few times,
and the man has not mentioned Arthur’s death once. This is where I learned
about the elephant—every time I saw this man there was the unacknowledged
reality of Arthur’s absence right in my face. And that elephant kept getting
bigger until I was pushed out of his life; I haven’t seen him in a long time.

I think what’s crucial for a
bereaved person is to have the death acknowledged. When someone doesn’t speak to
me about the death they’ve left our relationship, whatever it may be, frozen at
the moment of my husband’s death. So they and I are both reminded of that
moment every time we see each other. That’s actually worse than getting it over
with and speaking about it for a few minutes. All you have to do is say, “I
know. I’m sorry.”

Monday, January 11, 2016

What a beautiful gift David
Bowie has given the world with his music video “Lazarus.” This video was released
a few days before Bowie died, and from what I understand, was conceived and
produced after he was diagnosed with cancer.

In the video, a blindfolded
Bowie lies in an old-fashioned hospital bed (with buttons over the eyes), and
occasionally levitates, while singing “Look up here, I’m in heaven/ I’ve
got scars that can’t be seen/ I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen/Everybody
knows me now.”

There’s a woman who is a little
scary, sometimes she’s under the bed or standing against the wall reaching
towards him like maybe she’s trying to hold on to him.

Then the scene cuts to Bowie dancing,
without the blindfold. He sits down at a desk where he writes furiously. The
video cuts back to the figure in the bed singing, “Oh I’ll be free/ Just like
that bluebird/ Oh I’ll be free/ Ain’t that just like me” as he lifts his hands
to the sky. The video ends with the unblindfolded Bowie standing up from the
desk and backing into the wardrobe behind him like a coffin.

Thank you David Bowie for
having the courage to make this incredible statement.

Sunday, January 10, 2016

I’ve been mining the box of loose photos that my husband Arthur
and I accumulated over the course of our relationship. I found one from thirty
years ago that was taken in Arthur’s grandmother’s house. In this photo Arthur
is showing his cousin the book a friend of his wrote called White Trash Cooking. Arthur is dead, his
grandmother is dead, the cookbook’s author is dead, that house doesn’t exist
anymore…Looking at that photo made me think how as you age you start living
with ghosts—not in the literal sense, but in the sense that people and places
no longer exist on the physical plane but only in your mind.

Maybe this is one of the reasons older people start losing
their grip on reality, it suddenly occurred to me. Most of the things and
people that matter to them now exist only in their memories, and they prefer the
reality of their memories to ‘actual’ reality in which they are alone.

This brought up for me another difficult aspect of grief,
which is that you become the keeper-of-the-memories. Our point-of-view, our
subjective reality, is shaped by our memories, and as long as we have at least
one other person who was there when a particular memory was formed we can
confirm that we are anchored to reality. We can confirm that memory is ‘real.’ But
losing our partner-in-memory unmoors us. Was it real or did I just imagine it…who
knows?

Thursday, January 7, 2016

In my experience, grief
stimulates existential questions. An example of a question that kicks around in
my head a lot these days is: What is the point of living if we’re just going to
die? Are we born just to have kids, work a job, buy stuff, and die?

I was a little gloomy today and
brought these questions up with a friend. He said they reminded him of a scene
from the film ‘My Dinner with Andre,’ in which Andre tells his dinner companion
about a type of self-reflection where you ask

the same questions that
Stanislavski said the actor should constantly ask himself as a character: Who
am I? Why am I here? Where do I come from? And where am I going? But instead of
applying them to a role, you apply them to yourself.

The quote from the film brought
to mind a passage I’d seen recently from Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory:

The cradle rocks above an
abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of
light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins,
man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is
heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however,
of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for
the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his
birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged—the same house, the same
people—and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody
mourned his absence.

This is so true of my
experience. I have never worried about where I came from, and I haven’t heard
anyone else talk about that, although I’ve heard a lot of discussion about what
happens after life. Is it because the
universe exists in our reality only from our point of view? From our vantage
point the universe only truly became alive with our entrance. All that history
that happened before we were born is merely wallpaper for the events of our life. But how can the universe go on
without us being here to observe it? And who wants to become wallpaper for
someone else’s life?

When I got home my cat was
playing with her ball. I got down on the floor and played with her. She told
me: this is the point of being alive. Being. Experiencing. Loving.

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Today a hawk reminded me that
I’d forgotten my encounters with birds. In yesterday’s post I wrote about a
dream I’d had that told me to write about my encounters with animals. So I did.
But I forgot the birds.

This morning I went to the
dentist. I have an unusual problem, a dental cyst between two teeth. It was
removed by a periodontist but he’s unhappy with how my mouth looks; he says he’s
not sure what’s wrong. So he sent me to an endodontist to evaluate it. I saw her
this morning, and she also seems unsure what to do. She told me she needed to
confer with the periodontist before she could tell me anything.

When I left I missed Arthur
horribly. I needed someone to talk to, someone to help me through this problem.

A little later I was driving
down a street in a neighborhood and I said out loud, “I miss you Arthur, I need
you right now,” and just at that
moment a hawk flew across the road in front of me. The road curved and the hawk
curved and it flew along in front of me, just fifteen feet in front of my
windshield, for thirty feet or more, before it turned off into the woods. I
felt so blessed. The hawk felt like a calming voice from the universe saying,
“I am with you.”

This made me remember a couple of
experiences I had with birds in the last year. There’s a special tree I found
on the Mountain-to-Sea trail where I feel a strong connection to Arthur. I hike
up there regularly and spend an hour or more just sitting with the tree. I also
do some qigong while I’m there, which is a Chinese system of movements related
to Tai Chi.

The bird encounters both
happened while I was doing a movement I came up with myself called ‘Exalt-Bow.’
I hold my arms out palms up and raise them above my head, lifting my face to
the sky, then bring my palms together overhead and bring them down,
prayer-form, into a bow.

The first time I did that was
last April. As I lifted my arms and face to the sky I spotted a bird, I think
it was a hawk, soaring right overhead. Just as I spotted it, the bird stalled
so it paused right over me. Then it circled higher and higher right over my
head, before finally flying off. It felt like a visitation from Arthur, flying
high and free.

Last week I was up there again.
While I was doing Exalt-Bow and lifting my arms into the air a bird came
soaring from behind me and, just when I saw it the bird paused, just like that
hawk in April. It held its position for a moment, then began to soar again,
slowly, as I continued lifting my arms to the sky. I spoke aloud: “Thank you.
Thank you. I don’t know what it means but I like it.”

Monday, January 4, 2016

Last night I dreamt about an
animal, some kind of cat. The dream woke me up about 3 am. Half-asleep, I turned
on the light and wrote on the pad on my bedside table: write about animal encounters in blog. I promptly fell back asleep.

When I saw the note this
morning I remembered the dream but wondered what it meant. What animal encounters?
Then I remembered the bear, and the deer, and the squirrels…

I’m not a big believer in
dreams, but this was so unusual I decided to honor the dream’s message and, as
a friend of mine says, follow the prompt.

There are so many things that will
always make me think of Arthur. Squirrels are one of them. There have been many
times over the last months when I have been despairing and a squirrel has shown
up. I live on the edge of the woods. In the backyard there’s what Arthur called
a ‘squirrel highway.’ The squirrels take the same path day after day through
the trees. A Bradford pear tree is in the middle of their route. The squirrels
love that tree—in the spring they hang upside down eating the buds and in the
fall they eat the ripe fruit. Arthur loved watching them out of our office
window. Countless times last year I would be sitting in the office, sad and
bereft, looking out the window, and a squirrel would waggle its tail or leap
across a gap between trees and my heart would lift.

I live at the head of a cove,
near the Blue Ridge Parkway, so it’s not uncommon to see bears here. This
summer mother bears came strolling through the backyard many times with their
cubs. One morning I heard an altercation between two adults, one of them a
mother with cubs. The mother and cubs climbed up a tree for safety and I got
some video of them in the tree and climbing down an hour later.

One day when I had hiked up the
mountain behind my house I was sitting relaxed on a rock outcropping. I heard a
noise in the bushes below; it was obviously a large animal. A few seconds later
an adult bear emerged, no more than twenty feet from me. I had researched what
to do in this situation—first speak to the bear then make yourself look larger
if it comes towards you. So I spoke aloud: “I’m here, I know you didn’t expect
to find me here, this is a wonderful place isn’t it, I’ll be leaving soon…” and
as I talked it looked at me, then turned to amble off to my right. But after a
few steps it turned and started moving towards me and I remembered I had food
in my backpack that was halfway between the bear and me.

I grabbed a stick that happened
to be nearby, stood up and yelled at the bear. It was startled and turned and
moved off at a fast pace. I made sure it got out of sight before I let go of my
menacing stance. I gathered my things and left. But I was elated. That was the
closest I have ever been to a bear in the woods.

I’ve lived in this house for
six years now. I’d never seen a deer in my yard until last summer, when I saw a
deer in the backyard twice in two days. That was it for deer sightings. In
December I read the journal I kept last year. On Christmas Eve about sunset I
looked out into the backyard and a deer came strolling through. What was
notable about this was I had read the passages about seeing the deer that morning.

Mind the coincidences came into my mind. Not long ago I heard a friend
tell of a beautiful encounter she had after the death of her mother. She was in
a public place and a woman came and spoke with her. Some of the things this
woman said made my friend feel like this was a visitation from her mother. The
message she was given was ‘mind the coincidences.’

Sunday, January 3, 2016

Loneliness is one of the
hardest facets of grief. Today I searched through the journal I’ve kept since
Arthur died and ‘lonely’ is on almost every page. But I’ve noticed a change in
my relationship to loneliness over the last eleven months; I’ll illustrate that
change with passages from the journal:

March: The loneliness aches. I’ve
realized I’ve really never been lonely before. Certainly not in the last 35
years. I always had Arthur.

I thought I liked to be alone—I
often went on hikes by myself for example—but it’s become clear that that was not
true aloneness. Arthur was always there when I got home. I never felt this
bottomless pit of loneliness before. And being with people makes the loneliness
worse; the presence of other people
just highlights how alone I am.

April: There is an odd feeling
of lonely and not-lonely. I am such a resourceful person and have more things I
want to do than time to do them (as usual). At the same time, there is a deep
loneliness for Arthur. Some of that loneliness is for someone who knows me
deeply, who understands me, who knows my history and my neuroses. All this
knowing creates a profound sense of rest. All pretense (or at least it feels
that way) can be dropped and it’s okay just to be myself. I guess some people
have friends at this level but I don’t.

I feel sorrow for those who
don’t have my resources and are truly alone. If I feel the crushing weight of
loneliness with the friends I have and the inner resources I have, others must
be living lives of quiet desperation and inner devastation.

June: There are worse things than being alone.
When I thought of this I laughed because I knew Arthur would love it. Yesterday
I went to the grocery store and ran into a couple I know. I really like the
woman, but her boyfriend gives me the creeps. It’s hard for me to imagine what
she sees in him. “What crazy things people do to avoid being alone,” I thought
as I drove home. Let me embrace my aloneness.

July: I’m so
lonely. It’s hard going from having someone with you 24/7/365 to having nobody.
I find myself just wandering around the house feeling empty. The house is
empty. I’m empty. You were always here for me, with me, beside me. The
loneliness aches.

August: Tonight I thought: it’s
getting really abstract. The thought of missing you, that is. What I mean is so
much time has gone by now that I’m used to waking up alone, I’m used to eating
alone, I’m used to following my own schedule. So what was once a real bodily
sensation of absence is getting to be more and more a mental abstraction. Part
of me hates that this is happening.

September: It’s going to be a
long time without you. I’m still not happy about that. I still miss you. I’m
doing all kinds of things I’d never have done with you here. I love doing these
things. But the loneliness for you is always waiting for me when the activity
is done. It’s like there’s something wrong with the world; you’re not home
waiting for me.

October: Losing a lover. This
is something I am really suffering from. My entire adult life has been spent in
the company of a lover. This is why I am so alone. Friends don’t even come close
to replacing the complete companionship of a lover. I understand now why people
re-marry. Once you know the wonder of living with a lover it is hard to live
without it.

I am sad, and lonely, and
confused. I miss you deeply. But the intensity is easing.

November: I was just
wondering whether the fear of being alone has ruled my life. I never lived on
my own, not really. I met Arthur within days of graduating from college and six
months later we were living together. There were a couple of times over the
years when I thought about leaving Arthur; one of the things that held me back
was my fear of being on my own.

How much did I buy into some crazy belief that if you were alone that meant
there was something wrong with you? That being in a relationship proved my
essential okayness?

December: Embrace your
aloneness. I think that is the message of this dark time of the winter solstice.
Go within. Find yourself. Avoid the impulse during the holiday season to be with
people just to escape being alone.

I am embracing solitude, I am
breathing it in deeply and letting it feed me.

Friday, January 1, 2016

In honor of the New Year’s tradition of making resolutions, here are my
suggestions for what to do when someone you know is grieving:

Send a real, physical card,
whether you’re close or a casual acquaintance. Doesn’t matter if it’s six
months after the death. Email is okay, but I was shocked at how high the
email:card ratio was (that is, almost everyone only emailed). Doesn’t matter if
it’s a dorky card, the words don’t matter anyway, a card shows you went to some
effort and that’s what counts.

Send flowers if you’re at all
close. Send them a week after the funeral. Better yet, send a flowering plant
that will communicate love for a long time.

The first conversation is going
to be awkward. Trust me, the bereaved knows all about that so don’t let that stop
you from calling.

Be sincere; a bereaved person
is very open and vulnerable. I can’t tell you how many people left phone
messages, all weepy saying “whatever I can do,” and then when I called them
they didn’t really want to talk, or if I left a message they never called back.
I could have done without those calls. If you think this is you, don’t call,
send a card.

Let the bereaved prattle on. In
particular, let them talk about the person who died. I’ve been shocked how
people seem to think I don’t want to talk about Arthur, as if I don’t want to
be reminded he’s gone. Trust me, I can’t forget that, and I get a lot of
pleasure telling stories about him.

Don’t tell me how bad you feel
for not calling him, etc. I’m not really interested in how you feel guilty for
not spending more time with him.

Don’t assume the mourner needs
or wants company. For some people solitude is very healing.

As time goes by, send another
card, or two or three. It is so nice getting a card that just says ‘I’m
thinking of you.” In other words, “I know you’re still hurting and you’re in my
thoughts because I love you.”

About Me

I'm a philosopher, writer, videographer, and entrepreneur. In 2013 I've released a new book, "We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity." I'm the co-author with my husband Arthur Hancock of "The Game of God: Recovering Your True Identity.